How To Avoid The New Year's Resolution Trap with Dr. Austin Perlmutter

I want to pick up on something you mentioned before for the science-based rewiring, right? It takes about 60 to 66 to 67 days, I believe you said as well. And those are literally that you have to do that pattern every single day for that period of time, or is it sort of dipping in and out within that space?

That's a good question. The core concept of habits, and I've had the opportunity to speak with one of the world's leading researchers on this subject. It's basically to do something repetitively. And so in the same place, in the same way, so that your brain's habit system takes notice. Your brain's habit system, it's looking for the stuff that doesn't require a ton of your cognitive processing. So if every day you're doing something that's really intellectually challenging, that's always different, there's no way that's going to move to your habit loops. You know, so if you were living in a new city and you had to find your stores and stuff, that's not going to your habit loops the first couple times because it's all brand new. You're going to be a little bit stressed. You're going to be trying to think about, oh well, is this the right turn? And where is that store? That's not habit loop type stuff. If you do that same drive to that store, or let's say your office, every day, and it's always the same traffic lights and there's never anything new on it, for months, that's when your habit loops start picking it up. So basically you're speaking to your habit part of your brain when you do something in the same way, in the same place, day after day. And it's usually the things that don't require a whole lot of your high-level cognitive demand. So how does this come into play? Well, you want to find something that you're willing to stick to for that amount of time. And in order to do that, you need to find something that is easy and is enjoyable. So that's really important. If you hate it, the chances that you're gonna stick to it for 67 days or whatever are really, really low. If it's really challenging, the chances that you're gonna stick to it for 67 days are really, really low. If you decide, I want to be somebody who is in great shape, and the way I'm gonna do that is I'm gonna run a 5K at 5:00 AM every day, what are the chances that after 2 weeks you're gonna still be excited about getting up out of bed at 5:00 AM and running that 5K that you're gonna stick to it. It's really low. But what you can do is say, I wanna start with creating a habit that is easy, that I can commit to every day that is enjoyable. The enjoyable piece is interesting. There's a researcher named BJ Fogg who actually talks about this a lot. He talks about celebrating after you do these things because you create a little bit of dopamine, you make it more enjoyable. So to put that into practice, what we're talking about here is you want to be somebody who's in better shape. That's your end goal. The way you're gonna do that is to more consistently exercise. That's your sub-goal. And then the way that you're gonna get yourself there is not to run on a 5K every day. It's to say create a simple, easy, enjoyable, and readily reproducible each day habit. And that is going to be that at 7:00 AM you are going to have a cup of coffee, which is maybe already a habit, something enjoyable, and you're gonna put on your shoes, right? You're going to put on your gym shoes and you're gonna walk outside the door and that's it. That's the habit. So it's easy, it's reproducible, it's gonna be tethered to some enjoyment because you're gonna give yourself a cup of coffee and all you have to do is that to embed that. Now maybe once you're outside the house, you're probably gonna go for a little walk around the neighborhood. But that's not necessarily the main goal. The main goal is to solidify in your head this habit loop so that in a couple of months you won't even be thinking about this as you're sipping the coffee, you're putting on the shoes and you're walking outside. So it's finding ways to build it in that way. And the flip side of this would be for unhealthy habits. So let's say there's something that you do that you really don't enjoy, that you really don't enjoy as it relates to your health. A good example would be on the way home from work every day, you drive by and purchase fast food from a restaurant, and then you wind up eating that in the car. Or on the way to work, you wind up purchasing an unhealthy coffee drink every day and you wind up drinking that because you want the caffeine and the sugar. Or when you get home from work, you find yourself on the couch watching Netflix, eating a bag of chips, chips in the American sense, or a bag of crisps. Chips. Right. And so you say these are things that I do repeatedly that are obviously habits. And how do you know they're habits? Because when you're doing it, you're probably not all that conscious of it, right? You're plopping down on the couch, you're opening the bag. You're not necessarily thinking, I got home from work, I am stressed, I'm going to go pick up this bag of chips, then I'm going to go sit on the couch, and then I'm going to watch my TV. This becomes automatic. So you have to deconstruct it. And the way that you deconstruct it is you say, how do I make it less easy? How do I make it less enjoyable? And if you start applying this and you say, well, if basically on the drive to work I am buying this unhealthy drink and I don't like the way I feel after that, you may need to change your drive to work because what you may not know is that the trigger for you to purchase that drink isn't necessarily that you are feeling so bad and want the sugar. It's that you drive by that coffee shop and the coffee shop, every time you drive by it, your brain says, I know this one. When I go by this, I turn right, I park in this spot, I go order, So if you could get upstream of that, then you can really cut off these, cut the snake off at the head or whatever you wanna say. So how do you make it less easy? How do you make it less enjoyable? So making it less easy in the context of the eating of the crisps or the chips at home, maybe that just means you gotta stop buying those bags when you're at the store and you say, okay, well that's obvious, but not necessarily because what you may not appreciate is that the habit of going and sitting on the couch and eating that junk food is something that really needs to be cut off a week ahead of time when you're at the store and making those decisions. So the basic concept here would be if you look at the things that you wanna do more of, make them easy, make them reproducible, make them enjoyable. If you look at the things that you wanna do less of, make them difficult, make them less fun, right? So when you start applying this and you start looking backwards as to what are the series of steps that leads me to either a healthy or an unhealthy behavior, you're able to make changes before you're actually experiencing the kind of felt state of the action. You're able to be a whole lot more objective about it. And these are things that have been shown to be effective in behavior change, but this is a far cry from what I was saying before, which is the heart of the motivational space, which is just want it harder. Just get up earlier, just force yourself to do it. That doesn't actually work. We can all watch these workout videos of whoever, Dwayne Johnson getting up at 4:00 AM and lifting all the weights. But if you wanna get to the neuroscience of it, the things that we do are more a reflection of things like habit loops than they are levels of motivation on a given day. That's just not a good overall plan for rewiring your—

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